Thursday, 24 September 2009

My copy of Lud-in-the-Mist has a Neil Gaiman blurb on the back that says this book is :

'The single most beautiful, solid, unearthly, and unjustifiably forgotten novel of the twentieth century ... a little golden miracle of a book'

Now there's a certain amount of hyperbole there, but he's really not far wrong. This book is a gem. It's a fantasy novel originally published in 1926, eleven years before Bilbo Baggins hurried out of his round, green door. It's also a long way in scope and theme from the epic fantasy of Tolkien and his followers. There are no armies or Dark Lords in sight. The book's concerns are smaller, but dramatic enough in their own way. It concerns itself with the staid and proper city of Lud-in-the-Mist, whose citizens are horrified to find that "fairy fruit" is being smuggled into their town, down the river Dapple from the Land of Faerie. The citizens never mention Faerie or its - literally - forbidden fruit, trying to convince themselves that such unsettling things don't exist.

The fruit is dangerous, subversive even : it makes people waste away their lives in all manner of unproductive ways : writing, playing music and, you can be sure, much else besides. The modern reader might see the fruit as an analogue for drugs, but equally it represents the role of beauty and art in our over-controlled, rational lives.That said, Mirrlees is rather ambivalent about the merits of Faerie. We are never actually taken there; it remains an unknown in the text. Faerie as the id to Lud-in-the-Mist's ego perhaps? This is a story of ideas as much as anything. This isn't just another "fantasy" story, and that's wonderfully refreshing.

The book is elegantly, charmingly written. It's as if Virginia Woolf sat down to write The Hobbit and not John Ronald Reuld. Or as if Tolkien had had a crack at a Barchester novel. Or something. I do wonder whether it would struggle to get a publisher these days, though. It starts slowly and proceeds at a gentle pace much of the time.

Still, fans of fantasy and, you know, good writing should seek it out. Recommended.